Book Documents Widespread Election Fraud

Earlier this month, at a
conference in San Francisco, several renowned computer
scientists warned that electronic voting machines remain
vulnerable to computer hackers due to serious security flaws
in the operating software, calling into question the
integrity of a presidential election that is still seven
months away, and all other elections in the U.S. where paper
ballots have been replaced by these paperless electronic
machines.

There wasn't anything particularly new in the
scientists' revelations other than the fact that the
magazine PC World covered the issue and several other
mainstream news organizations.

Arguably, any mainstream
coverage these days of election fraud, voter fraud, a topic
of such national significance that it literally affects
anyone who has ever cast a ballot, can be credited to a
handful of hard core voting rights activists and muckraking
citizen journalists who have made it their life's mission to
overhaul the way people vote and restore much needed
integrity to the process.

The scientists' warnings that
this year's historic presidential election can be tinkered
with came on the heels of the publication of a
groundbreaking new book, "Loser Take All," a collection of
eye-opening investigative reports into past issues of
election fraud authored by voting rights experts, activists,
and journalists, who used old-fashioned gumshoe reporting to
expose the seedy side of the business of counting votes.

Unlike the reportage leading up the invasion of Iraq,
which relied heavily on anonymous sources who spoon fed
mainstream reporters wild tales of Iraq's vast weapons
cache, lapped up by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and
printed as fact, the reports about stolen elections, the
massive purge of minorities and poor people from voter
rolls, in "Loser Take All" is backed up by smoking gun
evidence in the form of documents and on the record accounts
from public officials and behind-the-scenes executives
employed by e-voting companies.

Perhaps no one has been
passionate about this issue or has worked as hard to attract
mainstream attention to the cause than bestselling author
Mark Crispin Miller, who edited “Loser Take All,” and
blogger Brad Friedman.

Well before anyone understood what
election fraud meant, Miller, also a professor at New York
University, and Friedman, whose BradBlog website is the
go-to place on the Internet for comprehensive coverage on
voting issues, were sounding early warning alarms and
educating the public about voting machines plagued with
software bugs, the ease at which hackers can bust into the
system and change the vote count for candidates, such as
George W. Bush, and place him ahead of Democratic challenger
John Kerry in states such as Ohio.

Miller, who wrote
extensively about how the votes cast in Ohio during the 2004
presidential election were stolen from Kerry and handed to
Bush in the book "Fooled Again," said in an interview that
the 2008 election can be stolen “through pre-emption of
innumerable votes, as well as through the use of e-voting
machines, both paperless touch-screen machines and
op-scans.”

“It's safe to say that the entire federal
government, insofar as it's controlled by BushCo's
appointees, has been diligently working to suppress all but
those votes that will support the [Republican] party,”
Miller said. “The [Veterans Administration], for example,
has announced that it will not help badly injured veterans
register to vote since those who've been thus damaged by
Bush/Cheney's war aren't likely to be big McCain
supporters.”

“On top of all this, there is, of course,
the fact that somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of the
electorate will either cast its votes on, or have its votes
counted by, computerized e-voting machinery that was
manufactured, and that is being serviced, by private
companies with close ties to the GOP,” Miller added.
Warren O’Dell, the former chief executive of Diebold, the
top manufacturer of electronic voting machines, famously
declared in August 2003 that his company was "committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president
[Bush] next year."

O’Dell’s promise became prophetic.
Not only did Ohio “deliver” electoral votes for Bush in
2004, the votes were delivered to Bush illegitimately, which
Bob Fitrakis documents heroically in the chapter, “As Ohio
Goes...”

“If the party can succeed in making this
race look "close" enough--and, with a media system like
ours, "close" can be as much as eight percentage points or
even more--they're in a very good position to steal
it...again,” Miller said. “All that they really need is
a convincing rationale for the surprising victory of John
McCain; and that rationale has been set up
already--"America's not ready to vote for a black man" or
"for a woman," and/or "for that woman", and, as well, "It
was that long, fierce civil war within the Democratic
Party," a "civil war" fomented by the GOP itself, through
their manipulation of the e-voting machines used in many
primaries, and the mass cross-over vote by thousands of
Republicans.”

Sadly, while these events in Loser Takes
All are supported by a mountain of documents, there are
many, including some of the more prominent players in the
progressive movement, who dismiss these findings and
disregard calls to action because they believe, wrongly,
that it may cast them as some sort of left-wing loon.
Indeed, publications such as Salon, Mother Jones, The
Nation, and TomPaine.com, have virtually ignored this
hot-button issue or have written about it in such a way as
to dismiss it as conspiracy theory. Editors at those
publications did not return emails or phone calls seeking
comment.

However, progressive news organizations such as
Online Journal, BuzzFlash, AlterNet, CommonDreams, OpEd
News, have been covering the issue since 2002 and are
largely responsible for disseminating much of the
information that appears in “Loser Take All.”

Miller
attributed such ignorance by the progressive elite to a
“toxic combination of denial and careerism.”

“On the
one hand, there's that all-too-human tendency to turn a
blind eye to enormous threats because they're just too
devastating to acknowledge Better, therefore, to pretend
they don't exist,” Miller said. “This sort of blindness
is, of course, well-known to therapists, who often have to
struggle with it as they deal with families ravaged by
addiction or domestic violence--families whose members can't
and won't allow themselves to see that, for example, mommy
is an alcoholic, or that daddy is a batterer. When they hear
the awful truth, they just go deaf to it, and stay
stone-blind to all the painful evidence that it is so.”

But if progressives are truly defined as a movement of
change than it is the authors of “Loser Take All,”
including Larisa Alexandrovna, Paul Lehto, Steven Rosenfeld,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and a dozen others, who deserve the
accolades for speaking up mightily and forcing the powers
that be in Washington, D.C in the blogosphere, and in the
media, to take note.

“Loser Take All” is indeed an
important historical document; a damning indictment of the
electoral process that also tells the real story of how Bush
was “elected” to a second term.

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